Bob Giuda: We have no cause to attack Syria

The absence of any definable benefit from a U.S. attack on Syria clearly stands as a reason to avoid advancing further into the Middle East quagmire which began with the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.

The Obama administration currently supports the Syrian rebels — an amalgamation of Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida sects and Syrian radicals, most of whom have migrated to Syria since the civil war began. We have forgotten that the ultimate objective of the factions we are to supply with arms is the downfall of the United States and the eradication of Christendom. They never, ever forget this. It is their prime directive. For 4,000 years, they have lived the credo that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

The United States has been at war for 11 years and yet has produced no lasting improvement in the lives of the people in the countries we invaded. More hate us now than before 9/11. They smile at us during the day and build IEDs at night.

The "democracy" we attempted to impose at a cost of trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of shattered lives (both military and civilian, and on both sides) is failing as the same agents of terror re-establish their ideology as we pull out.

Representative democracy cannot and will not succeed in any nation bound to Islam, because equality of personhood is not part of Islam. The principles enshrined in our Declaration and Constitution are lethal to their Muslim ideology. Hence the need to destroy America and spread Islam by the sword.

Our nation is in debt beyond its capacity to repay; our military is exhausted and being gutted from within by a Congress and White House that couldn't work together to provide a national budget as required by our Constitution; our leaders (military and civilian) are mired in scandals and, arguably, de facto treason; and our pride, most ably personified in the President of the United States, is driving decisions which none of our Founding Fathers would ever have made.

The American people are overwhelmingly against military action in Syria. But our national command authority, with its elitism, arrogance and ignorance of military doctrine, is poised to strike a nation that has absolutely no strategic importance to the United States except as a potential trigger for a regional holocaust in the Middle East.

Consider Obama's ill-founded political "morality," which accepts with regret the killing of 100,000 Syrian civilians with bombs and bullets, but is now threatening to act because 1,500 civilians might have been gassed by the regime. What a testimonial to hypocrisy! Either a government killing its people is wrong, or it is not. Using the "how" is a sickening political ploy that allows for the appearance of "conscience" by an administration that has wrought carnage around the world because of its ineptitude and treachery in foreign affairs.

Exactly what is our "mission" in Syria? No one has defined it because there is absolutely no justification for using U.S. assets against a tin-horn dictatorship in an area of the world that has been in conflict and under conquest since the beginning of time. Obama put his waning credibility at risk with his "red line in the sand" remarks about Assad using WMD. Now we are faced with serving Obama's ego as he wrangles with Russia's Vladimir Putin, who drew another "red line in the sand" with his threatened missile attack against Saudi Arabia if we attack Syria.

And let's not forget that Iran and Hezbollah and the Palestinians are looking for an excuse to eradicate Israel, which Obama's foreign policy has put more at risk than at any other time since its founding in 1948.

Until those in power can demonstrate a clear and present danger to the United States with the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syria, we should stay away. Sterile cruise missile strikes will accomplish nothing except to feed the ego and bolster the sagging political image of a President whose breathtaking arrogance and monumental foreign policy ignorance again puts our nation's young men and women at risk, with no quantifiable benefit to the stability of the region or the interests of the United States.

America has a choice: support Obama's ego, which has put us at risk of further protracting the regional conflict in the Middle East, and threatens to widen the conflict; or send a resounding "No!" to our elected representatives and senators and to the White House.

And then there's the still-unanswered question of Benghazi.

Bob Giuda is an airline pilot and U.S. Naval Academy graduate from Warren. He served as a Republican representative in the state House from 2001-2006.